The first computers were created in the 1950s. By the 1960s, serious
science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, visionaries like Marshall
McLuhan, and futurists like Alvin Toffler were writing both about the future of
computers and the ongoing effects that technology was having on everyday lives.

By the 1960s, two things were apparent: that computers
were shrinking the size of the planet; and that the future of computers was
networking them into some kind of inter-connected network, or “Internet”.

What few of the writers realized was that the US
government was thinking similar thoughts. The government’s concern however, was
not with creating “the Global Village” that Marshall McLuhan was writing about
in the mid-1960s, but surviving a nuclear war.

By the mid-1970s, the first personal computers hit retail
stores. Today over 1/3 of American homes has a personal computer, and those
numbers are skyrocketing.

During the mid-1980s, the computer network that the US
Defense Department created to protect its communications network in the event
of a nuclear war began to find a much more benign use. Just as the visionaries
of the 1960s predicted, people began to link their personal computers together,
and to meet other kindred spirits online.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, “Mosaic”, the first commercially available
Internet browser, began appearing on people’s computers, being sold both on its
own, and bundled with the software of online providers such CompuServe and AOL.

However, to see where it all began, let’s go back to the 1960s.

Birth of an Internet

Rent the movie Apollo
13, and watch the top rocket scientists in the world using slide rules,
because it was 1970 and the microprocessor - the computer on a chip, mankind’s
greatest invention so far - was still a year away. Eighty—five percent of the
scientists who’ve ever lived are not only still alive, they’re still working.
What will they invent in the next 20 years?” — Nick Murray, The
Excellent Investment Advisor

In the 1960s, a variety of visionary thinkers began to
discuss the creation of a wired planet. While the microcomputer had yet to be
invented (see above quote from financial author and speaker Nick Murray), the
handwriting was clearly on the wall.

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the
world in the image of a global village.” —
Marshall McLuhan

In 1966, Marshall
McLuhan coined the term “The Global Village”. Twenty Years after World War
II, and with the Vietnam War raging at full force, this was quite a radical
idea.

In May of 1967, a year before 2001:
A Space Odyssey, which he had co-written with Stanley Kubrick was
released, science and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was asked to
speak by the American Institute of Architects at their annual meeting in
Manhattan. Here are some of his more prescient comments, many of which eerily
foreshadow the online world of today.

Don’t forget that a generation has already
grown up that never knew a world without TV. One communications revolution has
taken place in our lifetime. The next revolution, perhaps the final one, will
be the result of satellites and microelectronics, which will enable us to do
literally anything we want to in the field of communications and information
transfer...

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final
body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of
staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what
I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day
when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater
reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another
exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special
forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from
continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few
minutes of transmission.

And in 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote Future
Shock,where he talked about computers, society, and even about
long distance relationships. In it, he made comments about “The New Nomads”, in
which he described the precursors to the incredible mobility of the Internet
generation:

In California, ranch owners fly as much as
120 miles every morning from their homes on the Pacific Coast or in the San
Bernardino Valley to visit their ranches in the Imperial Valley, and then fly
back home again at night. One Pennsylvania teen-ager, son of a peripatetic
engineer, jets regularly to an orthodontist in Frankfurt, Germany. A University
of Chicago philosopher, Dr. Richard McKeon, commuted 1000 miles each way once a
week for an entire semester in order to teach a series of classes at the New
School for Social Research in New York. A young San Franciscoan and his
girlfriend in Honolulu see each other weekends,

taking turns at
crossing 2000 miles of the Ocean. And at least one New England matron regularly
swoops dawn On New York to visit her hairdresser.

Never in history has distance meant less.
Never have man’s relationships with place been more numerous, fragile and
temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly
among those I have characterized as “the people of the future,” commuting,
traveling, and regularly relocating family have become second nature.
Figuratively, we use up places and dispose of them in much the same that we
dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the
significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and
few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.

What even the most visionary writers didn’t know is that the US
government was creating the direct predecessor to the Internet in the late
1960s.

In April of 1998, I interviewed Louis Rossetto, the CEO, founder and
executive editor of Wired magazine, in his office in San
Francisco, and asked him how the Internet began.

“It was set up by Arpa, which was a research
arm of the defense department, to connect researchers together in an atomic
bomb-proof network. So instead of having direct landlines, they had a
distributed network that passed messages along So that if you took a node out
of the network, the messages could route around that node, in the event of a
nuclear attack. So if one computer went down, it didn’t screw up the whole
system.

“It gradually became popular in the academic
community. People used it to communicate with each other, and then in effect to
publish on it. And then gradually more and more people got interested in using
it for communications and ultimately for publishing, and now for commerce.”

Arpa stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it was
founded in 1958. The original name changed in 1972 to Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, to reflect its assimilation into the Defense Department. The
Arpanet, established in

1969, was the first wide-area network and
the direct precursor to the Internet. Arpa built it as a research-sharing tool.

By the 1980s, The Arpanet was overshadowed by the National Science
Foundation’s high-speed NSFNet backbone and the regional networks connected to
it. Around this time, people began to think of this interconnected collection
of networks as an Internet.

Today, the dream of a global village is now a reality. The Internet
made it possible. Nina and I live this dream everyday. We have friends
scattered about the United States, England, France, Germany, and other
countries, but we can send them email instantly, or talk online with them for
hours, all for the price of a local phone call.

How I Discovered the Online
World

I was ten years old when I saw my first personal computer. It
was an Altair 8800, which my
school had acquired in 1976. I’ll never forget walking into the
classroom where it was kept. Seeing that machine for the first time, it was a
bit like all of my dreams from watching Star
Trekand Hal from 2001:
A Space Odysseyhad come true.

The Altair was hooked up to a Western Union teletypewriter, which was
being used as its keyboard and printout device.The monitor, a
converted television set, would come a little later. Programs were entered in
and saved to paper tape, which the machine punched, a bit like a player piano,
to save programs.

Soon after that, Radio Shack introduced their first TRS-80 personal computer in the late 1970s. I
managed to convince my parents to buy one, ostensibly to use in their retail
store. While ultimately I didn’t use it for much more than learning the BASIC
computer language and playing games, it was still a neat experience, in
retrospect, to be part of that pioneering computer age.

Around 1981, I had a 300-baud modem installed in my TRS-80. With it
came a free trial membership to CompuServe. I’ll never forget the first few
times I wandered into “CB”. CompuServe’s GO CB section was (and is) an attempt
to recreate the feeling of the then-extremely popular phenomenon of Citizen’s
Band radio. It was amazing to see how many people were online — even then — and
to talk to so many different people.

Even at the age of 16, it was obvious to me that talking online was a
way to really get to know other people and to get inside their “head”. It
didn’t take me too long to get used to typing instead of writing. And it didn’t
take me too long to meet people on CB.

Interestingly enough, my interest in computers waned as I started my
first year in college in 1983. I was too busy studying and attending classes to
spend time with my computer. Of course, nowadays, students use their laptops
and personal computers all of the time. At the time, I didn’t have a printer,
or a decent word processing program to use with my TRS-80.

It was right around this time that so many personal computer
breakthroughs began to occur.

IBM released their personal computer in 1983. Because they
allowed a then relatively unknown software designer named Bill Gates, and his
company, Microsoft, to keep the rights to the computer’s Disk Operating System
(better known as DOS), Gates was free to license his operating system to dozens
of small upstart companies. Thus, “clones” of the IBM PC began to proliferate.

During the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple launched their Macintosh computer
with a stunning commercial directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off directing the
blockbuster science fiction film Blade
Runner. While it wasn’t the first computer to feature one, The
Macintosh introduced most of the America public the concept of a graphical user
interface (GUI, pronounced “goowie”). Rather than the textual-oriented black
screen with white alphanumeric characters of DOS, the Mac’s screen was white,
bright, and friendly, and a mouse allowed the user to intuitively point and
click, rather than memorize and constantly type in commands, which DOS required.

In the late 1980s, Microsoft began developing a graphical user
interface of their own, called Windows, that worked in conjunction with DOS. By
the early I 990s, Windows 3.1 was an extremely popular interface for people
using IBM PCs. -

I purchased an IBM clone made by Commodore in 1989. However, I didn’t
have modem installed in it. At the time, going back online just didn’t seem as
important to me as having a computer that could do basic word processing, and a
printer to spit it out.

The Commodore IBM clone was replaced in 1993 by another computer, which
had Windows 3.1 installed. But even then, I didn’t resume going online until I
started my own business in mid-1994. Because I needed to communicate with one
of my

product providers via fax and email, I had a 14,400-baud
modem installed in my computer. Soon after, I began to go online, back to
CompuServe.

By then, CompuServe had designed a GUI of their own for
Windows called WinCim. WinCim made navigating through CompuServe much easier than
when I used DOS on my old TRS-80.

I was floored by how far CompuServe had progressed since my pioneering
days of the early 1980s. It seemed like there were forums about everything! And
so much information was at my fingertips.

In late 1995, I purchased my first laptop, an AT&T Globalyst 130,
that came with Windows95 preinstalled. Windows95 is the successor to Windows
3.1, and is now the standard interface for clones of the IBM PC. By November of
1997, I was living in California, but I was able to get my parents back in New
Jersey online, by purchasing a WebTV box and keyboard for them to put atop
their living room television set. Although they have limited computer skills,
they quickly picked up on the basic concepts of the WebTV box.